SOURCE: “Gissing's Exile in America,” in George Gissing: Lost Stories from America, edited by Robert L. Selig, Edwin Mellen Press, 1992, pp. 1-18.

In the following introduction, Selig investigates the circumstances surrounding the writing of Gissing's American stories, and asserts that “his large body of fiction accepted in America paved the way later for Gissing's success.”

In 1876 an eighteen-year-old George Gissing, later to become a major English novelist, disgraced himself so utterly that friends shipped him off to America, far from the shame of his petty criminal acts. Without knowing the squalid details of this scandal, one cannot even start to understand his desperate courage during a hard year of exile. As a brilliant underaged scholarship boy at Manchester's Owens College, which lacked all student housing, he had remained throughout even his junior year in his old high-school dormitory, a train-ride away, where he often studied ascetically from 4:00a...